Virtual Annual Meeting of the international study programme LCT

This year’s annual meeting of the Erasmus Mundus Master’s course “Language and Communication Technologies” (originally planned in Saarbrücken) took place as a virtual online meeting on 25th and 26th of June due to the pandemic.
Following the words of welcome by the President of the University Prof. Manfred Schmitt and Prof. Josef van Genabith (project coordinator), Dr. Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová (project manager) opened the Annual Meeting. Nine students presented their final project in three parallel poster sessions in discussion with academics and their co-students. The students then had the opportunity to speak to their local coordinators in virtual spaces, which is of course of great interest to the students who come to us in their first and second year respectively.
The second day began with an invited talk by Prof. Casey Kennington, an alumnus of the LCT programme, on “Dialogues, Robots, Semantics”. Other alumni then reported on their career after the LCT studies, which include both academic and career paths in industry, including the establishment of their own start-ups. In a round of company presentations a number of opportunities for internships were introduced.
Although the virtual meeting cannot replace face-to-face encounters at a local meeting (and the graduation ceremony also had to be cancelled), we can consider it a successful event for the international LCT programme involving more than 40 participants from around 30 countries.